Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I reread A Discovery of WItches to refresh my memory. Matthew and Diana are going back in time to find Ashmole 782 and find someone to teach Diana to better understand and control her power. Got it. Imagine my surprise when I started Shadow of Night and neither of those things happened until page 280, except in snippets that felt like tossaways to help the reader remember why the characters had traveled back to Elizabethan England in the first place. Oh, they weren't there to meet historical figures and notice every aspect of daily life and describe it in excruciating detail? Somebody should have told Deborah Harkness that. Like maybe her editor. My biggest problem with this book, however, was that I didn't like the characters anymore. It turns out Matthew is not an intelligent, urbane scientist who is every woman's dream guy. Nope. He's actually an impulsive, indecisive screw-up with serious anger issues (who has somehow managed to be friends with many major historical figures of the time, be an indispensable adviser to the queen, AND a member of The Congregation). Actual quote from the book: "Matthew was taking charge, which meant that things were about to take their usual turn for the worse." Page 295. I rest my case. He also suffers from an inability to let go of events that happened over a thousand years ago. But one conversation with Diana and poof! Problem solved. Spare me. Diana has become this meek, whiny airhead who is totally focused on fashion and minutia about running a household. And propping up her incapable husband, of course. Her major magical accomplishments in the first half of the book are making a quince shrivel and seeing colored lights in the corners. Every once in a while her "third eye" opens (and is it just me or do other people imagine this huge, Cyclopean eye popping out of the middle of her forehead when that happens? It's totally distracting.) and she sees something that is so obvious you have to wonder what the heck is wrong with her other two regular eyes. Then, she is suddenly in control of complex magic because she has colored strings. And I'm sorry, but I don't care what color string does what every time she uses magic. Find another way to describe what is happening. The best character in the book is Matthew's father, Phillipe. Too bad he's only in one section and we already know he's not around in modern times. I have to hope that Harkness has something up her sleeve to pull this series out of the muck in the third book.